At the height of the Vietnam War, on the night of the full moon, a baby girl is born along the Song Ma River in her mother's grave. Her name is Rabbit, and she can hear the dead. In a luminous debut novel, "She Weeps Each Time You're Born," Wisconsin poet and writer Quan Barry explores wartime Vietnam through the eyes of a little girl with an uncommon gift.More
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Arts and Culture
Nicola Griffith was born in England, is a lesbian and has MS. She's also a writer, whose character Aud, the deep-minded, has starred in several mysteries.More
Mark Mothersbaugh is co-founder of the new-wave band Devo. They think humanity is de-evolving.More
Joan Didion, who died last week at the age of 87, helped shape a highly personal brand of nonfiction that came to be known as the New Journalism. Her early essay collections "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968) and "The White Album" (1979) influenced generations of writers. Her later memoirs, "The Year of Magical Thinking" and "Blue Nights," chronicled the deaths of her husband and daughter. In 2011 Didion talked with Steve Paulson about illness and growing old in the wake of the death of her daughter, Quintana.More
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says most neuroscientists have downplayed the differences between the left and right sides of the brain. He says he thinks the left hemisphere has become so dominant in Western culture that we're losing the sense of what makes us human.More
Do intellectuals have any place in Hollywood? James Schamus is a scholar of narrative theory who also runs a movie studio. In this NEW and UNCUT interview, Steve Paulson talks with Focus Features CEO Schamus. More
His writing explodes with manic, high-octane verbal energy, and he wrote about everything under the sun. Verbal pyrotechnics aside,Salon book critic Laura Miller says David Foster Wallace was the most important writer of his time because he was obsessed with the question of how to live authentically in a media-saturated culture of hype. More
Helen Macdonald's book "H is for Hawk" turned her goshawk Mabel into one of the most memorable literary characters of recent years. Mabel is no longer with her, but Helen tells Anne Strainchamps about her new avian companion - an ornery and very smart parrot.More
Shattered by her father's sudden death, writer Helen Macdonald began dreaming of wild hawks. In an effort to move beyond her grief, she bought and trained a wild goshawk -- one of the world's fiercest birds of prey. But between the bird and her grief, she became, in her words "more hawk than human."More
The celebrated cartoonist Chris Ware has a graphic novel called “Building Stories.” It is full of stories. It is an actual building. Steve Paulson says, “it’s like nothing he’s even seen or read before.”More
David Byrne is one of those artists who just keeps reinventing himself -- first as frontman of Talking Heads. Then by making films and writing books. Lately, he's been making historical musicals -- one about Joan of Arc and one about Imelda Marcos. He's just released an updated version of his book, "How Music Works," which includes a new chapter called "Infinite Choice: The Power of Curation."More
Joey Skaggs is a master of the hoax. His elaborate pranks have been fooling media outlets since the 1960s.More
Dianna Dilworth is a filmmaker and journalist. Her latest documentary is called "Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie."More
Stephen Burn recommends David Foster Wallace's critically-acclaimed novel, "Infinite Jest." The book was published 20 years ago, on February 1st, 1996.More
Eugene Thacker talks to Anne Strainchamps about his book, "In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Volume 1."More
Journalist DT Max tells Steve Paulson about David Foster Wallace's creative struggles with the novel he left unfinished when he committed suicide in September of 2008. It's called "The Pale King" and explores Wallace's longtime preoccupation with boredom.More